Letting Go

I spent a week out west for a conference which happened to be in the same city where my sister lives so I stayed with her to save the company a few bucks. I ended up staying over the weekend to hang out with her and we convinced my other sister to come out too and make it a girls weekend.

I shared with them my frustrations –which they are all too familiar with – but I shared (aka bitched) none the less about Sybil and Norm and MN and MS. Both my sisters are stepmoms, neither of their situation is even close to half as bad as mine honestly. They’re sympathetic. They’ve never spent a dime on an attorney much less stepped foot in a court room. They’ve had their share of bullsh!t though.

I brought up the conflict avoidance that Norm has and how I really somewhat feel like I’m getting completely intolerant of it. How he won’t stand up to her and it drives me nuts. They are both smart woman- older and wiser to some extent so I listened carefully to their advice. One piece of advice they gave, although I would LOVE to follow- I will not and that was to address the issues with her myself. She has already told Norm that she will no longer read my e-mails for whatever lame ass excuse she concocted. If I were to call her she would just hang up. Essentially, she is scared of me. She doesn’t like it that I state the facts- truly I keep them simple, straight forward and leave all emotion at the door. She is so delusional that she cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction so that’s part of the issue. I can simply e-mail her:

“Hello Sybil,
You had emailed us last week that you would drop of a check for $x on Wednesday and you did not. Please advise when you will be dropping it off. The court order states on page 2 paragraph 1 “ excess funds will be returned to the respondent immediately”. Please comply. Thank you.”

This to her is an attacking harassing e-mail and she will not stand for it any longer and thus will not even read my e-mails. Then she will boldly lie that her bank’s online banking was down on Tuesday so she couldn’t verify the funds were there to write a check and when she called the bank to verify it that the phones were down. Right.

So confronting her myself is really just pretty much out of the question I think.

The second piece of advice they gave was to let it go. She is not my problem, she is his. If he chooses not to deal with her behavior, the consequences will be his. Let go. Let go of the control and let go of the vested interest. The biggest issue with this is that the consequences will not just be his. Our finances are combined so when she does not comply, it affects our finances. I cannot and will not separate my finances to assist in the ‘letting go’ process. That’s ridiculous.

Next, to an extent, we need her to comply with other requests based on the court order etc. Vacations, Doctors appointments, modifications to the schedule need to be approved by her and all those things DIRECTLY impact me. When she does not respond to him in a timely manner she affects me and my son. How does one let go of something that directly impacts them just because it’s (to a certain extent) out of their control???
My mathematical answer to that is to try to remove the part of the equation that is causing a negative impact. To remove Sybil is to remove the girls, a piece of the equation we fought much too hard and much too long to acquire-which leads me back to the beginning. I can feel the insanity starting to creep in, the absence of rational thought. Sybil is contagious and the cure is years away.